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Wayland 0.95.0 brings API stabilisation

Kristian Høgsberg, lead developer of the Wayland display server and its reference implementation Weston, has announced the release of version 0.95.0 of both projects. This represents the first proper release for both projects after several snapshot and pre-releases. Wayland was created as a potential successor to the X Server and the developers are now saying that they have reached the point where they want to start stabilising the software's APIs. While these have not yet been completely frozen, the developers are going to start using a versioning mechanism and incompatible changes will only be incorporated into the API if absolutely necessary.

The versioning makes things easier for Linux distribution maintainers who will now have a mechanism that alerts them of incompatible changes in Wayland. They can then work out which packages need to be changed in order to keep the distribution's version of Wayland from breaking. With the release of version 1.0 of Wayland and Weston, the developers plan to permanently freeze the API, preventing any further incompatible changes.

The release of version 1.0 is planned for this year, but current development speed suggests that it might be pushed into 2013. While Wayland is maturing quickly and has gained the ability to spawn its own X Server to run applications that are not directly compatible with it, the display server must still be considered development software and should not be run on production systems. Several Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, have declared their intent to eventually replace the venerable X Server with Wayland, but the completion of this move is expected to take a significant amount of time.

Source code for Wayland and Weston 0.95.0 can be downloaded from the Wayland area of the freedesktop.org site and is licensed under the MIT licence with some example code being provided under the GPL.